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For this particular study, nearly 400 patients with advanced-stage breast cancer were divided into three groups and received one of three therapies, in addition to their chemotherapy and/or hormonal therapy: a specialized reflexology treatment, a foot massage by a caregiver or conventional nursing care. Based on interviews conducted during the weeks before and after treatment, he researchers found that dyspnea – shortness of breath – and overall physical functioning of the reflexology group were improved more than the conventional care group.

What has been left out of all reports of this story thus far are the other results the authors found which included no significant differences in health-related quality of life, symptoms of depression or anxiety, pain and nausea relief. Furthermore, the group of women that received a regular foot massage showed a significant improvement in fatigue relief that was not matched by the group that received reflexology techniques. These irregular findings are typical of reflexology and, in fact, systematic reviews of the entire field have shown that it’s not an effective treatment for any medical condition.

This is also true of complementary and alternative medicines as a whole, where evidence of effectiveness is nonexistent, inconsistent or unable to perform better than a placebo. Yet many of these practices, including acupuncture, chiropractic practices, herbal supplementation and homeopathy seem to be increasingly sought out by people to cure what ails them, typically as a desire to cure the “whole” individual (mind, body and soul) through “ancient” and “natural” remedies. It’s easy to understand the line of reasoning that might lead to such a desire: if it’s been around for a long time, there must be something to it; if it’s natural, it must not be harmful; if it cures the whole individual, it will fix me, not my disease.

But the reason such therapies are able to thrive is because our modern society is such an amazingly safe place. Everything from level roads and clean drinking water to the mass availability of good food and medicine has ensured that more and more of us will die age-related deaths. This is wonderful news – we’re living as long as humans can possibly live. Added to the fact that alternative medicines are generally so impotent as to not be harmful, the use of the placebo-effective medicine will continue to rise.

Though a case could be made for the administration of placebos, what is inexcusable is pretending that such treatments work because of meridians, chakras, toxin removal or bioenergy. It’s all nonsense. While we should commend the researchers of this study for their desire to help people, their poor methodology and reliance on a disproven theoretical structure don’t do any good. Touching someone’s feet has been a sign of charity, humility and love for millennia.We don’t need to embellish these gestures with
mystical language or pseudoscientific claims to treat those around us with the care they deserve.

It’s quite likely that not a single reader stopped to question (let alone verify) whether the numbers stated above were true. Luckily for all of us, I don’t intend to pull one over on anyone and these statistics come straight from the American Automobile Association and the U.S. Census Bureau. However, this only leads us to ask the next and more pertinent question: How did they arrive at their numbers? As with just about any number, there are three methods: One can count, one can calculate or one can approximate.

Counting is the first approach we’re taught. It consists of finding the number of elements for some finite set of objects by increasing a counter by a set unit for each element. This is a more intuitive concept than the above definition would lead you to believe. If you have some number of turkeys plopped down in front of you, if you wish to count them, it’s necessary to mentally represent each turkey with a single digit and then go up the number scale by one for each new turkey. Whether the number is represented in binary in a computer or counted by a robot in a turkey factory, counting establishes a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of one set (number of turkeys) and the elements of another set (fingers on a hand).

Inherent to counting is the idea of “ordinality,” which states that of two given values, one can either be greater than, less than or equal to the other. Thus, a certain “order” is established with respect to their values. This can be honed further to the idea of “cardinality,” which more explicitly reveals the value or quantity of something. This is how we can go from saying there are more turkeys over there than here to saying there are five turkeys over there and only four over here.

But to know the one-turkey difference requires a whole new technique. And that technique is calculation.

It’s usually at this point that most people end their mathematical career. They found a tool for arriving at most numbers they feel will ever concern them (after all, Johnny is probably not going to give 7, 243 apples to Jane). However, calculation – the ability to transform inputs to outputs via mathematical operation – equips us with a tool to understand every number that could ever exist. When numbers like the amount of people who traveled (43.6 million) and the number of turkeys consumed (46 million) are incomprehensible to the human brain, calculation allows us to manipulate them into terms we can fathom – for each person who traveled, 1.055 turkeys were consumed.

But to know that one turkey is a more informative answer requires a whole new technique. And that technique is approximation.

Approximating – representing an inexact (though useful) value in place of an exact one – is when we balance the ordinality and cardinality of calculated numbers with the time and resources necessary to find and understand them. Typically one approximates when information is difficult to procure (How many grains of sand are there in the world?) or when further specificity does not radically alter the answer (the number of atoms in your body). The exactness required of an approximation is a function of the context in which the value is placed. Sometimes it’s better to be close enough than exact.

From the one turkey whose outline resides on our hands to the millions at the center of this past holiday, numbers run our world through and through. For as informative as they can be, they can also mislead, obfuscate and deceive. With three tools presented here – counting, calculating and approximating – we can more thoroughly question and answer the world around us. Only then – only by understanding how they are brought about – can we truly grasp their meaning.

She began by claiming that there’s a certain unwarranted resistance to. “indigenous knowledge systems” – systems of knowledge derived by local communities generally as part of a cosmology and expressed through laws, oral traditions and rituals – by proponents of “Western science.” By discounting these apparatuses of knowledge, Western science does itself a disservice by disqualifying modes of thinking and ways of understanding to both itself as a methodology and to the universe as a whole. Furthermore, Harding claims that these indigenous knowledge systems have allowed people to thrive and survive and accomplish great feats in their lives and therefore should be permitted entry into realms of science as valid forms of reasoning. In fact, she claims thatto do otherwise is intolerant and prejudicial.

One of the main reasons Harding gives for the existence of such opposition by “the West” – a term that’s more an abstract idea than a real “thing” – is that the West has built itself up for millennia by declaring certain dichotomies between itself and the “other” civilization. Such binaries include freedom vs. bondage, progress vs. retreat, universality vs. particularity and reason vs. dogma. Harding claims that what underlies each of these choices is the fundamental opposition of secularism and religion, legitimized by the. West’s massive scientific enterprise. If the sciences were to allow religiously derived indigenous knowledge systems into their ranks, the West would be unable to justify their exclusion anywhere else in it’s infrastructure. Hence, all of the progress the West has made would be undone.’ Thus the reticence.

Or at least so far as Harding would have us believe.

The actual reason is less romantic, less conspiratorial than all of that. These indigenous knowledge systems are usually just plain wrong. It’s actually quite a simple point Harding herself not only neglected to address in her lecture but also failed to answer adequately when questioned by the audience. When asked, “If there aren’t fairies in the garden, why should scientists care that some culture believes and acts like there is?” She retorted that we should accept their worldview because “it works.” She then lamented the grammar of the question, saying that it comes from a Protestant Christian type of secularism embedded in notions such as “beliefs” which have no bearing on other cultures, going so far as to say that indigenous knowledge systems “are not interested in the truth or falsity of their beliefs.”

But that fallacy obviates any possible scientific discussion. Scientific methods are about establishing the truth or falsity of claims about the universe using evidence and logic to attain these ends. If a knowledge system has no concern for whether or not what it says is true, I suppose that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t qualify as science. It cannot. It is for this reason that religious knowledge was excluded from scientific methods so very long ago, as it is neither held up by evidence nor held down by the lack of it. The truth or falsity of a religious or spiritual tenet is generally not near the top of the “List of Things Religious or Spiritual People Care About.” Usually, these belief systems are focused on ritual, community and understanding oneself and one’s place in the cosmos, and whether any of these religious beliefs are true or false is beside the point to a believer.

To a scientist, however, the truth of a claim is all that matters. The way the world is matters. Using the best tools we’can – evidence, reason, logic, deduction and experimentation – we’re able to paint finer and finer pictures of our cosmos. Our cosmic picture’s colors get more accurate, the positions of all the facts more precise, the canvas expanded nearer to its proper proportions. That someone else may draw a pretty picture of the same universe is nice and wonderful and spectacular and can be deeply moving to both themselves and others – it can be many things, but “science” isn’t one of them.

This isn’t to say that we can’t learn from others’ new techniques or ways to visualize our existence, but rather to declare that science can only be concerned with giving us the most correct picture it can, not the prettiest, not the most meaningful. The world we live in is the way it is, and it’s the job of scientists to find that out as best they can. If there aren’t actually any fairies in the garden, then there are no grounds to include them in science’s cosmic canvas, no matter how much we may wish them there.

My problem comes in the form of a single question: “What is your race?” This question has been asked for countless instances from job applications to scholarship forms, including nearly every governmental questionnaire starting from the original 1790 U.S. Census – it asked for total number of “white” men and women, “other” free persons, and “slaves.”
Today, the federally mandated question on race and origin of ethnicity gives seven total choices: Hispanic/Latino, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and White. The census also gives the option of checking two or more races. What will no doubt strike some readers is a lack of some categories altogether. Where do people from the Middle East, India or the Basque Country lie along these categories? There’s also a lack of descriptive force. Does “black” describe Aborigines, Haitians and Ethiopians in equal measure? What I find particularly distasteful is the notion that such categories even exist.

Try for a moment to formulate what “race” could mean. A myriad of factors are likely to spring to mind such as skin color, geographical origin and physiology.Some may even try to be a bit more scientific in their reasoning and say it’s ultimately a shorthand notation intended to stand in for underlying genetic factors. But there’s clear scientific evidence to suggest that the genetic variation within “races” far exceeds that seen between races. Physical traits such as skin color, hair type and bone structure show just as wide a range within geographical areas and racial bounds as they do across the whole spectrum of humanity. To suggest that there is some number of biological demarcations one could draw across humankind along ethnic and racial lines is to be mistaken at best and outright deceptive at worst.

Race is, at most, asocial construct.It has no basis in reality aside from the one we impart on each other. Only by pretending that such a thing as race describes us do we give it any credence or manifestation. This is not to say that race has not had very real consequences in our world but rather to lay the blame squarely at the feet of those who trod along this evanescent landscape. Furthermore, that anyone would wish to divide us any further than ideologies, predilections and actions already do is abhorrent. Some even go so far as to have pride in racial divisions. Numerous organizations, institutions and groups exist to emphasize “us-and-them” mentalities and to deepen those lines in the sand over which we dare not cross. Even worse than the mistake of separating yourself based on race is taking pride in yourself based on it. Esteem in one’s self should stem from one’s actions, one’s behavior and one’s way of life. There is nothing to be intrinsically proud of in bearing the human condition. What matters is how one comports oneself while bearing it.

Let us forget the lack of scientific evidence favoring a distinction amongst the races. Let’s do as many others do and pretend for this paragraph that there are races of people that have differing qualities and aspects. Let’s pretend further that these differences confer benefits and deficiencies of their respective races. Let’s pretend that race matters. Where in Ais state of affairs is pride to be found? Where is shame to be had? The circumstances of one’s genetic origin (millions of sperm assaulting an egg with a single winner) is as irrelevant to our characters as whether we were born during the day or at night. There is nothing about us to which race can add. That is, until other people say there is. Once enough people pretend that something is true, it becomes exceedingly hard to convince them it’s false. It becomes even harder to convince them that the questions they are asking are pointless. And yet there are forms asking us to divide ourselves, to state to which category we belong, to account for the happenstance of our lives. These forms would have us place ourselves in boxes. I will not do so. There is only one such box about our race that I would agree to check: human.

Any definition of “language” is likely to include points on translating signifiers into signs into symbols (letters and words) that can be arranged and rearranged by certain rules (syntax and grammar) to communicate a message. Languages are tools of communication. Were they not adequate mediums of expression, languages would have begun and ended in the grunts of our ancestors, never having risen to their place among the chief accomplishments of the human race. So engrained in our minds are the effects of language that we have a hard time picturing our lives without them – from speaking to, writing, thinking to doing, languages pervade nearly every aspect of everything we do. This is entirely true of programming languages as well.

And yet there is reticence to expanding foreign language requirements to include computer languages. Some contend that foreign language requirements should only extend to human languages spoken predominantly in other countries. There are three main arguments to this point: one, learning a language that’s spoken by a large portion of the population opens up more possibilities; two, there’s a deeper and more meaningful “cultural” significance conferred by spoken human languages; and three, programming languages are constructed and are therefore more “artificial” than other languages. Let’s consider these points in reverse order.

All human language is human-made and arbitrary distinctions made in favor of a preferred language smack of warrantless elitism. Furthermore, while history does bestow a certain cultural inertia to many traditional languages, to automatically dismiss the modes of thinking, types of expression and social aspects of programming misses a significant reason why we should try to learn second languages. And finally, there are millions of programmers across the world whose words have global effects; after all, the Internet is nothing short of the collected works of countless coding authors. Programming languages matter.

Even the U.S. government agrees. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama reiterated a point that his administration has stressed time and again: The country is in dire need of computer scientists, technicians and engineers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be more than two-million additional jobs requiring computer specializations by 2020. How will these demands be met with such a dearth in supply? We need people who can speak these languages. Without being able to communicate with professionals in a field – without understanding how computers, servers and just about every electronic device on the planet uses language to operate – there’s quite literally little to be said on the matter. We simply cannot solve our problems if we don’t know how to convey them.

Beyond the real-world applicability of learning a programming language as a second language, there are pedagogical benefits. Programming languages have fairly loin barriers to entry in that one’s thoughts can be translated quite easily from one’s primary language. This easy translation is also coupled with instantaneous feedback (whether one’s words, logic and syntax are correct will be checked almost immediately), removing’ the temporal lag in uncertainty and reducing the problem of working bad habits into one’s vocabulary. Moreover, creativity can flourish almost as quickly. Though you may be able to talk about your trip to the library and how nice the tables at the restaurant were after a semester of Spanish, after a semester of nearly any programming language a person is equipped to do everything from finding the first million prime numbers to creating a personal version of Tetris. The fact that computer languages are also uniquely positioned to take advantage of the recent trends in education toward online learning and massively distributed courses is one that shouldn’t escape educators and legislators alike. Programming languages are languages. Their importance is obvious and should be translated to our nation’s students. As our globe becomes increasingly interconnected, we need ways of transcending borders. The students of today must be able to greet this reality in as many ways as they can.

From my experience, the vast bulk of writing on science can take one of two approaches: the boring and the bombastic. Most popular publications let us leave aside the boring for now and focus on the bombastic. Rarely a week goes by without seeing a news outlet declaring some major advance in scientific knowledge that will revolutionize humanity in some way or another. Cures for cancer, new energy sources and genes of all sorts – this is fodder for contemporary science journalism, grist for the 24-hour news cycle milling out content as fast as it can. The journalistic apparatus we have to work with is a great machine for getting facts out, but given the noise from the constant hum of news, if anything is to be heard – such as a great discovery by scientists – the signal must be amplified.

This amplification lies at the heart of the disconnect between science and writing about science, though there are a few overlapping qualities between the fields of science and journalism: curiosity, attempted objectivity and the search for answers. They operate on vastly different time scales and seek vastly different ends. Where scientific writing requires immense context to be understood, journalistic writing should be understood at first glance. The journalistic formula relying on bold, concise headlines and a skeletal structure fleshed out with handpicked quotes doesn’t effectively communicate the scientific enterprise. If a headline in a newspaper read, “Bomb blast in Afghanistan kills dozens,” we would all readily understand it. The significance of something like, “Largest known prime number found,” is harder to assess. This speaks to the chasm between the public’s and the scientists’ understandings of science.

That second approach to scientific writing is partly to blame. It’s boring. Not only that, but leafing through nearly any scientific journal will serve to convince just about anyone that the material is thoroughly unintelligible to the uninitiated. Worse yet, the language scientists use to write to other scientists is often barren, tedious and dreary. Rare is the occasion that one finishes reading a scientific publication with the same excitement with which one began.

There are several reasons for this situation. Partly it’s from the fact that researchers chose to be scientists, not writers, partly because scientists often merely catalogue and report their findings – a rarely inspired form of writing – and partly because there’s an unspoken convention that being too dry is better than personalizing one’s prose. If journalists had to explore journals to get scientific stories, there would be far fewer scientific stories than there already are.

Thus, the rise of the scientific press release. Straddled uncomfortably between the boring and the bombastic, the scientific press release has to express often quite humdrum research in a rousing way in order for it to get published. Unfortunately, this frequently leads to overstated conclusions and deemphasized methodologies, while skirting aspects of peer review and validation. Much of the noise in scientific journalism – that is, much of the confusion among lay readers — comes from the clangs of press releases falling through the press’s echo chambers.

How we express information can be nearly as important as the information we express – the signal matters only if it is sufficiently larger than the noise. The information that scientific enterprises have given us is among the most important we could have. We know where we’ve come from, what we’re made of and how we relate to the entirety of the cosmos because people have sought evidence, created theories and shared what they learned with others. If we are to understand further frontiers, we cannot be afraid to take a moment to assess our situation and discuss it clearly with those around us, be it the bounds of science or the limits of writing about science. If our march forward is to be certain, it helps for us to be as surefooted as we can.

Rebecca Skloot is also a woman. She lives the life of an author and journalist, writing about science and medicine. She, too, has a family, friends, hobbies, grudges. And she holds down a job and has polished her toenails. On Tuesday, she visited the University to discuss her New York Times Best Seller, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Framed as a biography of cells and a story of people, her talk covered aspects of privacy, tissue ownership and informed consent in medical sciences during the 1950s. But mostly she talked about Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta Lacks was born Aug. 1, 1920. Early in 1951, Lacks began to feel abdominal and cervical pains. She was diagnosed with a malignant cervical cancer. She was treated with radiation, which failed to stop the spread of the cancer. It eventually metastasized throughout her body. On Oct. 4, 1951, she died.

Before her death, cell samples from her cervix were removed by her physician and given to George Gey without her or her family’s permission. At the time, permission for cell and tissue harvesting was neither required nor typically sought, especially for such small samples taken during routine procedures. Gey was requesting every cell and tissue sample he could because of his interest in creating an immortalized human cell line – that is, cells that could be indefinitely cultured. Such a creation would have an incredible impact on biomedical research, as it would allow for more standardized and rigorous experiments. After many failed attempts, Gey succeeded in creating this cell line with Lacks’s cancer tissue, still in use today. The cells Gey created were called “HeLa” cells, after Henrietta Lacks. For many years, several textbooks, journal articles and press reports mistakenly claimed the cells were named for Helen Lane, Helen Larson and Henrietta Lakes. This error was promulgated partly because of initial concerns for privacy and partly through a continuation of earlier inaccuracies. Indifference to the person they came from also played a role.

Skloot first learned about HeLa cells in her community college biology class. She was told the cells were immortal, came from a woman who died of cancer and that she was black. She and many others before her were told these details as if they were all there was to it. After all, what was supposed to matter was that these cells had helped millions, and potentially billions, of people as a result of biological and medical breakthroughs. That was what was supposed to matter – not the person they were from. That was the story we knew until Skloot came along.

In the half century between the death of Lacks and the beginning of Skloot’s investigation, trillions and trillions of HeLa cells had been grown. For all the good the cells had done for the world (used to test the polio vaccine, develop genetic mapping techniques and understand cancer), very little was known of the woman who brought them into it. After a decade of research, Skloot delivered a book that would tell Lacks’s story and reignite debates in scientific ethics that rage across the nation.

Debate in scientific ethics is rarely simple. Typically the scales of moral justification in science are nuanced with attempts made to carefully calibrate them to balance the severity of pain with the potential for progress. It’s not easy and has been constantly refined as more evidence comes in. But for science to be self-correcting, it must periodically be wrong. And sometimes it is.

One such instance that Skloot elaborates upon throughout her book is the infamous “Tuskegee syphilis experiment” that spanned from 1932 to 1972 in which nearly 600 black men in Alabama were monitored to track the progression of syphilis in natural environments. Those that had syphilis (399 of the original participants) were never told they had the disease and were actively prevented from getting treatment. As a result men, women and children needlessly suffered and died as sacrifices at the altar of ethically disgraced science.

Too often we forget that science is just another thing people do. We forget that scientists are people, no different than others, with families, friends, hobbies and grudges. Their job puts them in a unique position of trust, and this must not be abused. After all, scientists are people and so are their patients. We must all communicate with one another honestly and openly as we go through this life – it’s the only way we’ll make it.

The stories of science are the stories of humanity’s place in the universe. But this only matters insofar as we remember that it is human beings for which and about whom these stories are told. So the next time you see “HeLa lives!” scrawled on the bathroom walls of a medical research facility, take a moment to remember that once Henrietta lived.

If the sheer volume of books, articles, treatises and Internet comment sections are anything to go by, ethics is a contentious subject. Because the actions we take matter, and because our actions are propelled and limited by what we consider we ought and ought not to do, our moral opinions have very real consequences. If we think that there isn’t such a thing as private property, theft becomes hard to dissuade. If we contend that charity doesn’t help people, we might be disinclined to give to charity. In fact, it’s only because our actions have consequences that the morality inspiring them matters.

Moreover, the consequences only matter if they affect the overall well-being of someone either positively or negatively. The use of the term “well-being” here is meant to encapsulate all the thing so that go into making someone (biologically, psychologically, existentially) happy, content, fulfilled, etc. It’s meant as a catchall term, like “health,” to describe the physiological state of biological beings, given the limited space of our discussion. Thus, the reader will know what I intend when saying that stealing in most cases likely diminishes someone’s well-being, whereas being charitable most likely increases another’s well-being. If there were no effects on well-being, the morality of our actions would be moot.

It’s this consequentialist framework that surrounds the debates on animal testing for scientific research. The debate focuses on whether the methods and results of animal testing justify the use of animals. The facts of the matter are that millions of animals each year are subjected to millions of scientific experiments, many of which can cause pain and suffering. Great scientific progress has been made as a result of these experiments, alleviating the pain and suffering of millions of people and animals around the world. How one sees the balance between the first and second points is what leads some to feed fish to minks and others to throw bombs.

Make no mistake – many of us are alive today because of the efforts of scientists working with animals. Vaccines for chicken pox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, hepatitis, measles, mumps, polio, rabies, smallpox and tetanus, every single medication on the market, many medical procedures (from angioplasty to organ transplants) and most life-saving medical devices (replacement and artificial organs) all come as a result of tests first done on animals.

However, many would contend that these ends – good as they are – don’t justify the means by which they are achieved. What’s taken from animal research, be it from mice, rats, dogs, cats, monkeys or people, isn’t sufficiently balanced by what’s gotten out of it. That is, the suffering (minimal as it may be) and deaths of animals are too high a price to pay for the value achieved, just as stealing doesn’t make all parties involved richer (and in fact makes us all poorer).

Our relationship with our fellow animals (are we not merely mammals?) must be established if we are to properly gauge the benefits and detriments of our actions to them and for ourselves. Should we consider them property, meaning that we can do with them whatever we’d like? Should they be given rights, forcing responsibilities unto beings incapable of understanding them? These are difficult questions that need answers if we’re to ever to increase the overall well-being of all relevant subjects. The borders of our morality need illumination, and it’s with the light of reason – not from the flames of terrorists – that we’ll continue to find them.

Started in 1927 (years before Mainstone was born), the experiment sought to prove that some substances that appear solid, in this case a petroleum derivative referred to as “pitch,” may in fact be very viscous fluids. To prove this, some pitch was placed in funnel, allowed to settle, and eventually it dropped through the bottom much as water might do through a faucet though about billion times slower: the first drop of pitch fell over ten years after the beginning of the experiment. The subsequent seven drops took 8.3, 7.2, 8.1, 8.3, 8.7, 9.3, and 12.3 years to fall respectively. It has been over 13 years since the last drop and physicists around the world wait with bated breath and a live streaming webcam.

This is because in the 86 years since the beginning of the experiment, no one has seen a drip drop. Not even its caretaker of 52 years, John Mainstone.

To have so devoted one’s life to one thing and never see it come to full fruition is nothing short of existentially devastating to many of us. As Mainstone’s colleague physicist Halina Rubinzstein-Dunlop notes, “John’s death is particularly sad as […] he did not see a single drop fall.”

I contend, however, that perhaps the point of the experiment (to watch pitch drop) isn’t the point of the experiment at all. Or rather that it rises above this simple goal to loftier heights. It is not merely an experiment in watching stuff move slowly, though this does have important ramifications in fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics, and tribology. Instead it is a profound expression of the difference in scales between human beings and their surroundings.

Simply put, we are middle-sized primates on a middle-sized world capable of observing middle-sized things. So much is beyond our scope on any scale – the size of an atom, the weight of a sun, the smell of dark matter, the taste of a black hole, the sound of the continents moving – that it would not be an over-exaggeration to say we perceive next to nothing at all.

Just about every sound our species ears have heard has fallen between the 20 and 20,000 Hz, a woefully small margin incapable of hearing the tides or appreciating a dog whistle quartet. Every sight our species eyes has seen has come from the electromagnetic waves approximately 390 to 700 nanometers in length, a sliver less than 0.00000000000000000001% of the spectrum we can currently measure. As nature made us, we are blind, deaf, and dumb in a very real sense.

That we have found out the extent of our ignorance is perhaps the crowning achievement of all of science. Through careful observation, objective reporting, and sharing what we learn, we have been able to develop a knowledge base and methodology powerful enough to predict the movement of stars trillions and trillions of miles away simply from the light they left billions of years ago, powerful enough to make instantaneous communication across the planet nearly trivial, and powerful enough strip atoms of their electrons. We have come a long way since the savannah.

Mainstone’s missed drops are only but a few in the bucket of stuff we miss in our universe. If John Mainstone’s death is sad for missing these, we might weep everyday for all that is seen and unseen. We might also well up in gratitude that such people exist, willing to face down nature and watch it work. Though we were not equipped to do so, we have equipped ourselves. With patience, perseverance, and cunning we have equipped ourselves.

We have split the atom, we have seen stars explode, and we measured rocks flowing. And it was all because of people like John Mainstone.

We are likely all familiar with the Pledge of Allegiance, but just in case it goes something like, “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” While the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case claim that only the “under God” portion of it shouldn’t be there, I contend that the whole thing has no business be recited by anyone.

There are many good arguments against reciting The Pledge in schools including the fact that making children (who are unable to consent to anything) swear an oath to their country every day is quasi-tyrannical, borderline creepy, and wholly mind-numbing. There are even those in favor of the notion but against the execution, arguing that if you want to make something mean as little as possible, make children recite it every day for thirteen years.

But I would go a step further than both of these camps and contend that the pledge itself makes no sense. Let’s just start at the beginning: “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.” Flag, United States, Republic.

First of all, I owe no allegiance to a flag. A flag, being little more than a piece of cloth with some color on it, has little sway over who I am or what I do. I outgrew the period of my life where the color of my clothing mattered (in high school I reckon) and now my relationship with clothes is purely functional. Only insofar as a flag tells me which way the wind blows do I have any cause to raise one.

Secondly, I owe no allegiance to the United States of America. Mostly because I have no idea what is required to do so in this context. Loyalty, fidelity, obedience, what does any of this even mean in relation to a “country”? Is this allegiance to the government that runs it, to the people that live in it, to the boundaries that enclose it? To what and to whom am I swearing this faithfulness? And in what ways am I to be faithful, to be obedient, to be loyal? In what ways am I to manifest this allegiance? By agreement, by assent, by assurance? I cannot assure the borders, I cannot assent to all the actions of the people, and I cannot agree to the government.

Because, thirdly, I owe no allegiance to the republic. So that we are on the same page, I take a republic here to mean something along the lines of “a state whose power/control is held by citizens and their elected representatives” or in an Lincolnian shorthand “of, by, for.” I owe nothing here because the republic will take my allegiance even without asking me. In practically all situations where the republic is concerned, consent is assumed rather than solicited. Your taxes are withheld, your rights will be handed down, and you can’t vote “no” to the process. Honest Abe’s propositional government of inescapable prepositional phrases means that I’m culpable whether I want to be or not.

The next bit – “one Nation under God” – is the section that Massachusetts parents have taken issue with, as do many other atheists, agnostics, and all sorts of religious people who do not subscribe to the Abrahamic god. How this line makes no sense is self explanatory: it is simply incorrect.

To make matters worse, this nation of people is posited to be “indivisible,” likely for poetic flair. Of course we are divisible. The nation is divisible right down to every person it claims and then some. We are all individuals with individual hopes and drives. We must be divisible if human rights are to mean anything: human rights necessarily rest on the assumption that a person means something in and of themselves.

If we were truly indivisible then the part that matters most “liberty and justice for all,” would be utterly incoherent. People can be free and justice is only justice if it is for all. To this and to this only would I pledge my allegiance as suggested. I pledge no allegiance to any flag or to any nation. To my fellow human beings and to the pursuit of liberty and justice for each and everyone of them, do I pledge my allegiance.

Last night the University of Michigan’s Department of Medical Education held a memorial service for the friends and families of its anatomical donors. These donors are individuals who decided to give their bodies over to the University after their death for use in medical education, scientific research, and technological development. Those in attendance heard stories of gratitude from medical students, doctors, and engineers who have all directly benefitted from these donations. It was an emotional night, with the heart pangs of sorrow and the full body warmth of thankfulness palpably clear for all in attendance.

Anatomical donations have come a long throughout the history of medical education: from an era when the thought of human dissection was inconceivable (and anatomy was learned strictly through centuries old texts) to the reign of body snatchers (where admission to medical was conditional on an applicant having an anatomical specimen) through to the present day where a single body may be used to educate a thousand students throughout the course of a semester.

(As a bit of historical trivia, there was a time when medical schools were so desperate for anatomical specimens that they would pay top dollar for just about anything, no questions asked. University of Michigan Medical School alumnus Herbert Webster Mudgett, better known by the moniker H. H. Holmes, seized upon this to construct a huge mansion during the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago for the sole purpose of killing people, dissecting their bodies, and sold their skeletons. In so doing he became America’s first serial killer. Mudgett’s/Holmes’s picture can still be viewed on the second floor connector of the UM hospital between the Cancer Center and the main hospital. Class of 1884. Number 38.)

Today the procedures for body donation, procurement, and treatment are all covered in the United States under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a set of laws designed to curb human trafficking, eliminate the black market sale of organs, and ensure that the dignity, respect, and privacy due to such donors are held in the highest esteem.

There is no dispute that such donations are hugely beneficial to nearly everybody involved. There are statistics out there that show students taught anatomy with access to real anatomical specimens, vastly outperform those without such exposure; there are lots of studies that show how necessary it is for doctors-in-training to work with real anatomical donors before treating patients; and it is undeniably true that much of the progress made in medical device design and manufacture is due in large part to anatomical donations made across the world.

Arguably the only people who do not benefit from anatomical donations are the donors themselves. They are helping med students, they are helping doctors, they are helping future patients and all at a time when these students, doctors and patients cannot help them. So why do they do it?

It was the individual, unspoken answers of the donors that were commemorated yesterday. For a brief moment, students and doctors, friends and family, paused to reflect on the genuine altruism of such people. Charitable in life and in death, they are truly some of the best this world has to offer – they are the best of us. What was commemorated were the people helping other people for no other reasons than that they could and that they thought it was the right thing to do. We shall be forever in the debt of such individuals, only hoping to pay forward what we can with better science and medicine, with better education and technology, with a greater appreciation for the kindness of others and a generosity that aspires to the heights attained by those willing to give even beyond the mortal world to help this one. What was commemorated, what was celebrated, was the very definition of our humanity.

Just as right and wrong answers exist to many questions, so too do right and wrong questions to go along with them. And yet this fact is rarely acknowledged, discussed, or entertained with the exception of conmen and congressmen, but I repeat myself. Worse still, there are those who would have us believe that all knowledge is relative and that any way of gathering it is as justifiable as any other. This is wrong both in its diagnosis and prognosis of the situation – not all opinions are valid.

It is about this point that a hackle or two has likely been raised with a few ires. However, I would like to submit this as evidence in favor of the approach I am trying to convince you of here. Those individuals who would respond that I am perhaps too dismissive of other positions or unfairly characterizing what it means to be relativistic in this context must, at the very least, be claiming that my opinion is in some way wrong. That’s fine. It might be. And that’s the point.

I can be wrong. I have been wrong. I am probably wrong about at least a couple dozen things in my life at this very moment, and some of them may even be espoused in some of what I write here, but these are things I can correct by asking and being asked the right questions. In a very real sense, the casting away of incorrect opinions is the surest method for being less wrong, and hopefully, being more correct.

To this end, the importance of questioning far outweighs that of facts. Facts without context are meaningless, but questions without purpose are wasteful. An orphaned fact often does little to distract us from matters at hand: whether FDR was the 32nd or 33rd President of the US won’t typically deter conversations about the modern relevance of the New Deal’s policies. Moreover, facts are easily amenable to objective arbitration: we can plug numbers into calculators, we can look up quotes, we can pinpoint dates. Facts can be known with or without calling upon our critical thinking skills.

The same is not true of asking questions. Asking questions is at base all there is to our critical thinking skills. If our thinking did not require rigor there would be no motivation to question any part of it. Therefore, the very nature of critical thinking stems from the fact that we are questioning our reasoning in an effort to be less wrong and vicariously more right.

But just as not all opinions are valid and not all facts are relevant, not all modes of inquiry are created equal. Somewhere between the incredulous silence of complete complacency and the incessant, bottomless ‘whys’ of a child who has long stopped listening to proffered answers, lies an optimal balance of questioning and acceptance, of knowing and not knowing.

Unlike a fact without context, a question, however ill-posed, is liable to hijack our cognitive apparatuses. This is because questions spark investigations, send our minds off searching for solutions, looking for reasons, and figuring out new questions to ask. Our brains were equipped long ago to be pattern-seekers. To seek a pattern means to ask what pattern may exist and go about finding it. We can go beyond this base level of thinking by asking further “how might we go about finding that pattern?” or “how will I know if a pattern is meaningful?”

Questions are the filters we use to separate signal from noise. If we fail to recognize that this sort of positive inquiry is the process of extracting meaningful information from an otherwise incoherent mess, we will fail to avail ourselves of our most effective means of figuring out the world around us. Consider that to my concerns above “Where have I gone wrong?” is a much more powerful question than “What facts have I gotten wrong?” because it encapsulates a broader context of thinking as a process of analysis and not merely as a recitation of facts.

However, let us remember that this can all be wrong. And the only way any of us can ever know is by knowing the right questions to ask.

In an in-depth interview with Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine, the Justice went on record to discuss many things, from his staunch opposition to certain rights for homosexuals to his favorite television shows. Perhaps most surprisingly during the conversation was his genuinely stated belief that the Devil of the Bible is “a real person.” Scalia cited his Catholic faith as his reason for believing, claiming that it was what “[e]very Catholic believes” and is necessary “[i]f you are faithful to Catholic dogma.”

When pressed for evidence of the Devil’s existence, Scalia admitted that the Wicked One isn’t making pigs run off cliffs or possessing people much these days (something the Prince of Darkness was apparently fond of during the time of the Gospels) because He’s gotten “wilier” over time. Scalia claims that the Antichrist spends most of His time these days convincing people He doesn’t exist (along with that god he supposedly opposes), and that this is a “more successful” strategy. On Scalia’s scoreboard it’s Keyser Soze: 1, Regan MacNeil: 0. Let’s reflect for a moment on how terrifying it is for the longest-serving justice currently on the Supreme Court to take this absence of evidence as an indication of a nefarious existence. Far scarier than any demon is this man with the Scales of Justice in his hands feeling the weight of thin air. The man actually believes in the Devil.

Scalia then draws the conclusion that this shift in diabolic policy (from an active to a passive role) is “why there’s not demonic possession all over the place.” Nowhere in the interview is there any hint that Scalia has considered the null hypothesis: there are no devils. No angels have fallen from heaven nor serpents risen from hell, people have been people and the world has been as it is far longer than many traditional religious accounts would insinuate. This, however, is not how Justice Antonin Scalia sees it all, a fact he has repeated time again as he declares his Catholicism the guiding philosophy behind the justice he doles.

This is the same Catholicism responsible for witch hunts, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. This is the philosophy of a Church that believes the introduction of condoms into the third world is far worse than spread of HIV, that ordains that consenting adults can only love each other in certain ways, and that has bred the largest population of pedophiles in human existence. This is a philosophy that convinces grown men to believe in fairy-tale monsters and excludes grown women from its priestly class. It should, therefore, come as no surprise when Scalia was “offended” by the interviewer’s question “Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?” Given his philosophy, it is the Devil who should be afraid.

As should we all.

That religious beliefs, ceremonies, and ideologies should have no place in the governance of citizens of this country is self-evident. That a judge, let alone one of nine responsible for shaping the rights of hundreds of millions of people, should not accept conclusions without evidence, is not an unfair request, indeed it is foundation upon which all justice must be based. That this conversation is even necessary speaks to how far our civilization still has before it.

To say that beliefs in devils and demons, ghosts and spirits belong to the childhood of our species is to be too charitable with our condemnation. We must and we should hold such beliefs in contempt. No contemporary society benefits from its populace’s fear of its devils nor from the charity of its gods. It is people alone that determine what world we have before us. It is a world that Scalia would rather have perched over the heat of hell’s fires than have homosexual couples feel the warmth of loving hands in emergency rooms. The millions of people that believe as he does stand as a testament to the quiet tragedy of ancient roots poisoning our modern landscape.

Growing up Catholic myself, as a child, I feared the Devil. As a man, I fear only men. I fear those who would treat this world as but the antechamber for the next, I fear those who would rule over others with divine instructions, and I fear those who see devils where there are only men. But I am hopeful. Our species’ capacity for compassion and understanding and love far surpasses that mandated by the archaic texts of antiquated deities. One day we will grow beyond our childhood fears.

Though I can only be so hopeful. After all, there’s at least one man that actually believes in the Devil.

Let me state that emphatically: there are no ghosts. There are no hauntings. Everything that goes bump in the night has a name and there is nothing under your bed aside from what you yourself have placed there. We do not live in a paranormal world. However, this is not to claim its opposite, as we also do not live in a normal world, at least as far as our mammalian brains are concerned. Far too many of the possible experiences this universe has to offer are outside of sensible reality for us to call anything around us normal or ordinary. Our universe is extraordinary, and that’s my problem with ghosts.

If pop culture is anything to go by (and it probably isn’t), then the above description I gave for ghosts – the spiritual remains of a dead person, left to wander the earth – tends to hold true. This is what people report when they report seeing ghosts. When places are said to be haunted they are often said to be haunted by someone who died there under bad circumstances, think Civil War battlefields, abandoned hospitals, hotels with a sordid past. Observers of ghosts will say they see soldiers, patients, caregivers: people, always people. And that’s my first gripe with ghosts: Why stay in the shape of one’s former body? Why not become gigantic or exceedingly small? Why not experience the world from the perspective of an amoeba or a nebula?

And beyond that, why stay in the shape of your former body, let alone go to the trouble of wearing the clothes you died in? Is there some limitation on how far ghostly particles can spread apart from one another or some inhibition from them assembling in some manner beside how they were moments before someone’s death? How do ghosts’ underwear know to travel with them to the other realm, but not to do so if simply thrown away? And just which of a person’s earthly possessions knows to follow to the afterlife? Clothes have figured this out, but cars and computers are notably absent.

And exactly which moment before, during, or after the death process does one become a ghost? The cells of a person continue living long after they themselves have died. So too do the populations of bacteria we culture all throughout ourselves (and the 100 trillion or so microorganisms in our guts surely appreciate it). A heart can stop beating before a brain ceases to work, a brain can die long before the rest of the body. Strokes and ablations can ruin parts of the brain years before death, does my soul know this and adjust accordingly? And has the spiritual world figured out how blood transfusions and organ transplants affect their ghostly systems? They figured out their clothing policy, but have they really kept up with the medical literature?

And why is it that ghosts only seem to be found in dark/abandoned/scary places? As I said, ghosts supposedly walk the grounds of where they met their untimely deaths, but what is off-bounds here? Are there ghost police that say other ghosts can go a couple hundred feet from the spot of their demise, but not a couple hundred more? Can they go up in the sky, down in the ground? How far? Is it a spherical region equidistant in all directions? Referenced to the earth obviously, otherwise every death would just leave a spectral breadcrumb trail of the path of the earth as it spins (at ~1000 mph), as it goes around the sun (at ~67,000 mph), as the sun goes through through the galaxy (at ~420,000 mph), as our galaxy moves through the universe (at ~2.2 million mph). If ghosts like dark/abandoned/scary places, there are few better than the distances between galaxies.

Our universe is extraordinary and ghosts are boring. With this universe around all around us at its different scales of space and time, why would anyone bother scaring teenagers? Ghosts are free of their earthly limitations. They could hear the moan of spacetime warping around giant stars, they could taste black holes, and they could smell the void. Even if required to stay on earth they could experience the molten center of it, a thing of cosmic beauty just beneath our feet. They could watch evolutionary processes on a global scale. They could feel our world grow warm.

They could do so much and they don’t. This is why ghosts are lame. Or maybe I’ve gotten this all wrong, maybe that is what they’re all doing. At least that would explain why they aren’t there.

When pressed for an answer for why winters are cold, many people will often hem and haw about the earth being farther away from the sun in the “winter,” receiving less light, and thus colder. This is wrong. And this line of thinking exposes a bit of northern hemisphere bias, since the southern hemisphere of the planet experiences summer as we take our winter. If we consider that the variation in the orbital distance between the earth and the sun is approximately 3,110,000 miles, which is nearly 800 times greater than the radius of the earth, we can see that all regions of the earth are affected about equally by this variation and therefore is not the cause of seasonal changes.

However, that seasons are hemisphere dependent suggests an answer, namely that the tilt of the earth is the reason for the seasons. And this is true as far as it goes. Since the tilt of the earth remains constant, during the northern hemisphere’s winter, the northern hemisphere points away from the sun, causing the sun to be lower in the sky, heating the ground less efficiently, shortening the days, and bringing on the cold. But the “tilt of the earth” answer always seemed a bit shallow to me as it fails to answer the more interesting question: why do we feel cold? And as with most “why” based questions, there are both proximate and ultimate answers.

The proximate, or most direct, answer is that we don’t feel cold. In fact, human beings and other animals do not feel temperature at all. What we actually sense is the flow of heat caused by temperature differences. We feel “heat transfer.” This is not a trivial distinction. Everything in a heated oven is at the same temperature, but a cake pan will hurt more to touch than the air around it because the heat transfer from the pan is rapid and intense, while that from the air is slow and inefficient. Heat transfer is the answer to more questions than many could have hoped to ask, and it tells us why we feel cold.

In general, there are three main types of heat transfer. The first and most intuitive is known as conduction. Conductive heat transfer occurs when two objects of different temperatures physically contact one another. Heat energy from the object with the higher temperature will flow into the colder object until the two are at equilibrium. This happens when two people hold hands or when a significant other asks to have their cold feet warmed up.

The second type of heat transfer is known as convection and is essentially the same process as conduction, except instead of two solids interfacing, now one solid interfaces with a fluid (either a liquid or a gas). Fans feel good in the summer because they push air across our skin and wick away heat (in conjunction with evaporation, another type of heat transfer) and why they would feel so bad to us in the winter.

Conduction and convection are the primary causes of the ultimate answer to why we feel cold. These are the two modes that have shaped our physiology and guided our evolution. They are why the ears of rabbits are long, why noses get cold to insure that the rest of the body remains warm, and why the genetalia of human males are kept outside of their torsos. The forces of evolution are mindful of thermodynamics if but for no other reason than that it is the law. We feel warmth and coldness because there is a higher evolutionary pressure to determine differences in temperature rather than absolute temperatures to ensure survival.

Perhaps the least intuitive but most important of the three modes of heat transfer is radiation, the process by which energy is transferred in the form of electromagnetic waves. While conduction and convection require a physical medium to move heat about, all things at all times are taking in and giving off this radiative energy, with “hotter” objects giving off more radiation than they take in and “colder” objects taking in more radiation than they give off. This is the reason we can feel the sun’s warmth at all.

If we take this fact to its logical end, we come to our revelation: we feel cold because space is cold. When you step outside in the morning on those winter days, you are feeling outer space suck away your heat. Every chill, every shiver, every breath hanging in the air is directly attributable to the cosmos’s cold, unfeeling nature. With an average temperature of approximately -450 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 Celsius), space does not seem particularly suited for the lives we enjoy. Coldness is the rule, not the exception.

In fact, instead of asking ourselves why it gets so cold, maybe we should ask, “why does it ever get warm?”